For six days, 1,000 U.S. evangelical pastors traveled through Israel, holding a mass prayer at the Western Wall, meeting with freed hostages at the Oct. 7, 2023, Nova Festival massacre site and attending private high-level security briefings.
Billed as “the Friends of Zion Ambassador Summit to Israel,” the early December trip was, experts said, the biggest pilgrimage of evangelical leaders in Israel’s almost 80-year history. Its goal was to address what was long hard to imagine: The fraying rock-solid bond between evangelical Christians and Israel. The shift in recent years has multiple triggers, including surging anti-Israel sentiment among influential Christian conservative social media figures, including Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes, whose audiences number in the tens of millions.
Israeli and U.S. organizers of the trip see it as part of a new, collective messaging campaign to stem the growing disaffection among younger religious conservatives who increasingly see Israel as a malign force with outsize influence on America’s politics and culture.
Among the pastors on the trip was Dwayne Carson, who came back fired up to challenge a world he sees as growing hostile “towards our Jewish friends,” he wrote in an email to The Washington Post. After returning home to South Carolina, the head of the media ministry Date the Word told his approximately 10,000 followers about his trip in his newsletter, on social media and on his radio show. He told them what he reads as black-and-white instructions from God in Exodus: The land between the desert and the river belongs to the Jews.
Religious leaders, Carson said, need to challenge uber-popular podcasters such as Carlson, who recently hosted a friendly interview with the white supremacist and antisemite Fuentes in which Carlson called Christian Zionism “a brain virus” and a “dangerous heresy.” Carson said a “shocking” number of evangelicals aren’t familiar with the Book of Genesis, in which God tells Abram, “I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse.”
To Carson, “that’s foundational for the evangelical Christian worldview.”
But what for a half-century has been basic gospel to evangelicals is no longer a given. And that has created anxiety among Israeli government officials as well as some American evangelical leaders.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other top Israeli leaders met Wednesday morning in Palm Beach, Florida, with about 40 major U.S. evangelical leaders, including pastors of megachurches and university leaders.
“The number one issue was the youth in America and what’s transpiring with this ideological war,” Christian Zionist leader and trip organizer Mike Evans told The Washington Post on Wednesday.
The changing relationship between evangelicals and Israel reflects a general change in American attitudes. For the first time in a quarter-century, Gallup in March found that fewer than half of Americans said in the “Middle East situation” their sympathies lie with Israelis. (Thirty-three percent said the Palestinians.) The shift has been building but accelerated because of Israel’s response in Gaza to the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks, which only 32 percent of Americans support, Gallup found this summer.
But younger evangelicals’ bond to the state of Israel is loosening in specific ways.
A survey by Marquette University Law School in December found that while 70 percent of evangelicals over the age of 60 approve of Israel, 39 percent of those 18 to 29 do. Pew Research found that support for Israel’s government among White evangelicals (who make up 70 percent of that group) dropped from 71 to 61 percent between February 2024 and last September.
Carlson in recent months has hosted a range of anti-Israel conspiracy theorists. Among them were: amateur historian Darryl Cooper, who implied on the show that Jews’ deaths in the Holocaust were a result of poor Nazi planning, not genocidal intent; Owens, who said Israel is a “demonic nation” and that it had a role in the killing of Charlie Kirk; and Fuentes, who told Carlson the major roadblock to American unity is “organized Jewry.” They all frame their comments on Israel as part of an “America first” agenda that they say has been unfairly framed as antisemitic.
The pastors who went to Israel say they’re focusing on more zealously combating what they see as an information war being fought on a social media battlefield. They wrote about 30,000 posts over the six-day journey, that were seen, Evans said, by more than 20 million people.
“I realized the urgency [for the trip] because Israel has been losing the ideological war on steroids and the media war,” Evans said. “They need friends, and Bible-believers [such as the pastors on the trip] have always been very supportive of Israel because it’s a Jewish Bible and they preach from it every Sunday. All of Christianity came out of Israel.”
Evans has fought publicly with Carlson in recent weeks. He told the pastors in Israel that Carlson has “no moral compass” and told the Jerusalem Post that Carlson is saying “worse things”than the Nazis had in their party platform. He publicly challenged Carlson to a debate and told the Post that Carlson was spreading antisemitic lies by saying in interviews that Israel had intentionally targeted churches in Gaza and “murdered” Christians. In one attack, Israel said it was targeting a Hamas control center — not a church, and in another that fragments from a shell accidentally hit the church and that Israel “deeply regrets” the loss of any innocent life.
Carlson, in his interview with Fuentes in October, said of Christian Zionists that “I dislike them more than anybody.” The Jerusalem Post on Dec. 12 said Carlson referenced Evans directly in a podcast interview Dec. 10.
“I am totally anti-Nazi … I am totally anti-hate, and above all, I am anti-blood guilt and collective punishment, which is what was bad about the Nazis, let us remember. And this guy is a Christian minister, or supposedly,” Carlson said on Theo Von’s podcast “This Past Weekend,” which has been watched by 2 million people.
A key reason evangelical support for Israel is loosening is because a key part of the theology that undergirded that support — the ideas that the state will play a special role in the return of Jesus, and that God intended a special, blessed nation for the Jews — is declining, said University of Wisconsin religious historian Daniel Hummel. It is being replaced by theological ideas that either emphasize social justice and the plight of Palestinians, or that reject a special theological role for the state of Israel, or both.
The support of U.S. evangelicals is seen as essential to many in power in Israel.
Israel since 2018 has invested $100 million in efforts to boost Israel’s image in the U.S., the Israeli news site Haaretz reported in November. It cited $9 million the government has agreed to pay to U.S. conservative consultants to focus on American Christians — evangelicals in particular.
The Israeli Foreign Ministry helped fund the recent trip, Evans said, along with money from Friends of Zion, the network of Christian Zionists he founded. Evans says there are 30 million people in the network that connects people for Israel news, prayer and fundraising.
Most people on the trip advocate for the state of Israel to annex the West Bank, which under international law Israel has been illegally occupying since the 1960s. The group toured Shiloh, a West Bank settlement to which many evangelicals attach Biblical importance.
Johnnie Moore, an evangelical businessman close to President Donald Trump and who joined the Israel trip, thinks the weakening of support for Israel among evangelicals is “vastly overstated.”
“The good news is that the relationship is really moving from being sentimental to more substantive precisely because of the questions. In the end, the relationship will be stronger, not weaker,” Moore, now Pepperdine University’s head of Middle East Studies, wrote The Washington Post.
Shlomo Fischer, an expert on evangelicals’ connection to Israel based at the Jewish People Policy Institute in Jerusalem, said the shift is the result of changes on both sides.
“Support is declining because Israel appears an oppressive, aggressive nation,” he told The Post. Also, “Americans seem less inclined than previously to see Israel as a parallel chosen people.”
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